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Based on my now obsolete HOWTO thread for installing Plex Media Server on the WD My Passport Wireless (non-Pro model), I built an unofficial installer package which makes the installation of Plex Media Server a breeze on the "old" WD My Passport Wireless portable hard drive.

This self-extracting installer package will automate all steps of my now obsolete HOWTO to install Plex Media Server on the WD My Passport Wireless. The package does all kinds of error checking and will perform a new PMS install or upgrade an existing PMS install to the latest version and detect broken installs and fix them. I've also thrown in an uninstaller script to completely remove PMS from the WD MPW and restore the device to its factory settings without deleting your media files and Plex Media Server database.

Navigate to the Admin tab and enable the SSH and FTP access options. You may also switch the Battery Optimization scheme to Performance in the Hardware tab and turn off the Twonky Media Server by disabling the DLNA Streaming option on the Media tab of the web interface. If you don't, my installer package will take care of all that anyway.

Copy the installer package to your WD My Passport Wireless public folder either by opening a network connection to your device or by connecting the device to your computer via USB. Leave the installer package in the root directory of your drive, do not copy it into a subfolder!

SSH into your WD My Passport Wireless with a SSH client, for instance "Terminal" on OSX or "PuTTY" on Windows. Enter ssh root@192.168.60.1 in the SSH client, then enter the password: welc0me (yes, that's a zero, not an capital "O").

Navigate to the root directory of the hard drive by enteringcd /DataVolume in the SSH client.

Make sure that the installer package is located in the root directory by entering ls in the SSH client. The package should be listed under the name PlexMediaServer-1.7.2.3878-WDMPW.run.

Run the installer package by entering ./PlexMediaServer-1.7.2.3878-WDMPW.run in the SSH client and let it perform its magic. This will take a few minutes.

Done! I highly recommend restarting the My Passport Wireless now.

You may now reach and configure your shiny new Plex Media Server by entering http://192.168.60.1:32400/web in any web browser on your local network.

Upgrading an existing Plex Media Server installation

For those among you who already installed Plex Media Server with the help of my now obsolete HOWTO, you may use my unofficial installer package to upgrade your Plex Media Server installation to the latest version. The installer script will detect that PMS is already installed and perform a safe and clean upgrade.

Uninstalling Plex Media Server

I have included an uninstaller script in the package. This script will perform a clean uninstall and restore your WD My Passport Wireless to its factory settings without deleting your media files and Plex Media Server database. It provides an option to remove the Plex Media Server database as well. Your media files will remain untouched on your hard disk.

A few considerations

As you add content to your portable Plex Media Server and start scraping Metadata for your content, you will notice that the WD MPW is not the fastest kid in town. Scraping Metadata for a movie may take up to a minute until the posters, fan art and movie info is displayed in the PMS Web interface. Browsing through the Web interface isn't the fastest experience neither, nevertheless, the WD MPW serves content quickly and flawlessly to Plex clients on its network.

Sometimes the PMS web interface will throw an error while loading the Dashboard or the Server Settings pages. This seems to happen mainly when PMS is very busy scanning your media files and fetching data from the Internet. Clicking on the Home or Settings button again usually fixes the issue.

Please be patient with your WD My Passport Wireless Plex Media Server!Give it some time to scan your media files and fetch data from the internet.

I noticed that the Plex team has added a bunch of new content auto-updating options in PMS since v1.0. This means that PMS will scan your media files and/or its own database quite often to perform maintenance tasks even if you haven't added any new content recently. This is great when you run PMS on a powerful computer or NAS and have a good internet connection, however, on the MPW, this may lead to slowdowns which are not necessary.

I recommend that you turn off as much content auto-updating features as possible once your PMS is up and running and update manually only when you add new content.

Specifically, in the PMS web interface, go to Settings, Server, Library, turn on Show Advanced and untick the following options:

You may keep the following options ticked, as they won't put too much strain on the device:

"Backup database every three days"
"Optimize database every week"
"Remove old bundles every week"
"Remove old cache files every week"

END EDIT

Once we connect to the WD MPW Plex Media Server from a client device, we need to force the client to precache the Metadata from the server. Do do this, simply browse for instance to the Movie library and show all movies. Then, slowly move down the movie list while the list gets populated with Metadata (posters) until you get to the bottom of the list. This takes about one to two seconds per movie. Once you've done that, browsing your movie library will be snappy. Repeat this for your TV shows, making sure that you display all episodes of all seasons for every TV show. The same applies for your Music library, repeat the above steps for the Artist list and for the Albums list. You'll need to do this precaching on every Plex client you plan on using with the server.

Don't expect your portable PMS to be able to transcode any media, its tiny single-core ARM processor is just not made for such heavy processing. It'll happily stream any kind of content to your devices by DirectPlay though.

To copy content to the device, connect the drive by USB 3.0 instead of WiFi, this will be at least 20 times faster.

The official HOWTO to move an install to another system works perfectly, but there's a catch. As soon as you have pointed your libraries to the new media directories on your WD MPW, PMS starts to re-download all Metadata from the Internet again, and that's obviously not what we want!

The trick is to create a symbolic link on our WD My Passport Wireless that replicates the directory path of the PMS we replicated the library from. This will work without a hitch if your main Plex Media Server is on a Linux or Mac OSX box. If your main PMS is on a Windows machine, you're probably screwed...

You may think of this symbolic link as an "alternative path" to your media folders.

As an example, here is what I did. My main PMS is on a QNAP NAS. On this device, my media folders are all located under /share/CACHEDEV1_DATA/Plex\ Media.

I simply replicated the original file path of my QNAP NAS on the WD MPW and created a symlink pointing to my actual media folders, which is under /DataVolume/Plex\ Media/.

Now, the Plex Media Server on the WD MPW sees the media files in the exact same directory as on the original Plex Media Server on the QNAP NAS I replicated the library from, and thus doesn't do any cumbersome Metadata scraping.

Install worked great for me !! Thx a mill. I have no internet connection and this is perfect for me to watch on my sony bravia TV (KDL-55W808C ; android TV system).

I am only experiencing one pb : Sometimes, it seems that the plex app doesn't launch itself while booting. At least my tv plex app is not able to find it even though both are connected together through Wi-Fi. i don't have thois problem with my amazon firetv stick because i can there change the server IP adress and write in 192.168.60.1 over port 32400.

thanks so much - this has worked really well for me. Awesome job! I see you have updated the server - I will give that a go...I have the same problem as jeanbaptiste of the server not starting sometimes.

@REBELinBLUE said:
Awesome! Thanks. Have you thought about posting the instructions on somewhere like github so other people can create the new releases so you don't have to?

Hey REBELinBLUE,

Thanks for the suggestion. I could indeed do that, but then everybody could and probably would mess with the installer script file and screw it up, which would defeat the purpose of my installer packages I personally compiled and tested...

What I can tell you is that if you wish to upgrade your installation yourself before I upload a new release, then it's actually quite simple. If you know what you're doing and have basic Linux knowledge, then you only need to download the PMS update for Seagate ARMv7, rename it from *.rbw to *.tar, decompress the file, then decompress the resulting content.tar.gz file, then decompress the resulting content.tar file, then navigate to the resulting opt subfolder, where you'll find the plexmediaserver folder which contains the PMS installation. Then make a copy of the start.sh file in the Resources subfolder of your working PMS installation on your WD MPW. Then rename the new plexmediaserver folder to Application and overwrite the old Application folder with the new one and overwrite the start.sh file in the new Resources folder with your backup of the start.sh file. Now reboot and you'll be running the latest release.

But I'm sure it's not worth the trouble to do it manually. Just wait until I upload the latest release of my installer package which will do everything for you.

@jeanbaptiste.mine said:
I am only experiencing one pb : Sometimes, it seems that the plex app doesn't launch itself while booting.

Any idea if it is possible to fix that pb?

Hi Jean-Baptiste,

Sorry for replying late!

Well, I'm not sure what the problem might be. I haven't experienced this issue myself, but consider this: while PMS on the MPW is indexing media, it'll take so much processing resources that eventually the MPW will become unresponsive and not even be able to show its own web interface, let alone display the Plex Media Server web interface. Maybe PMS is running but as you can't access it, you think that it's not running.

According to this WD support thread, this seems to happen on the new official WD My Passport Wireless Pro with PMS as well...

Are you saying that usually PMS starts up just fine and that sometimes it doesn't? This means that your installation is fine but that sometimes there's something fishy going on when the device boots.

Next time you experience this issue, please make sure that PMS is indeed not running on the WD MPW. Do do this, ssh into the device as usual and type top. Then check in the list if one or several PMS services are running. If they are, then PMS did indeed start but is so busy that it makes the MPW unresponsive. In this case, just let it run for a while and let it do what it needs to do. Once it finishes indexing media files and downloading stuff from the internet, it should become accessible again.

If you don't see any Plex services running, then your PMS did not start. Please try starting PMS manually by typing: ./DataVolume/Plex\ Media\ Server/Application/Resources/start.sh & and check if it starts that way.

You could try changing the name of the PMS autostart script from S92plexmediaserver to S99plexmediaserver, which would make PMS one of the very last services to start when you power up the MPW and see if that helps.

I noticed that the Plex team has added a bunch of new content auto-updating options in PMS since v1.0. This means that PMS will scan your media files and/or its own database quite often even if you haven't added any new content recently. This is great when you run PMS on a powerful computer or NAS and have a good internet connection, however, on the MPW, this may lead to slowdowns which are not necessary.

I recommend that you turn off as much content auto-updating features as possible once your PMS is up and running and update manually only when you add new content.

Specifically, in the PMS web interface, go to Settings, Server, Library, turn on Show Advanced and untick the following options:

i followed your instructions, everything seems to have been installed correctly. however when i try to access 192.168.60.1:32400/web is asking for to login, it behaves as if is couldn't find any media server actually running.

here's another piece of the puzzle, i created a separate account for this install, just curious what would happen after login. and as suspected now is telling me that it can't find a plex server. i'm honestly stumped

@REBELinBLUE said:
Awesome! Thanks. Have you thought about posting the instructions on somewhere like github so other people can create the new releases so you don't have to?

Hey REBELinBLUE,

Thanks for the suggestion. I could indeed do that, but then everybody could and probably would mess with the installer script file and screw it up, which would defeat the purpose of my installer packages I personally compiled and tested...

What I can tell you is that if you wish to upgrade your installation yourself before I upload a new release, then it's actually quite simple. If you know what you're doing and have basic Linux knowledge, then you only need to download the PMS update for Seagate ARMv7, rename it from *.rbw to *.tar, decompress the file, then decompress the resulting content.tar.gz file, then decompress the resulting content.tar file, then navigate to the resulting opt subfolder, where you'll find the plexmediaserver folder which contains the PMS installation. Then make a copy of the start.sh file in the Resources subfolder of your working PMS installation on your WD MPW. Then rename the new plexmediaserver folder to Application and overwrite the old Application folder with the new one and overwrite the start.sh file in the new Resources folder with your backup of the start.sh file. Now reboot and you'll be running the latest release.

But I'm sure it's not worth the trouble to do it manually. Just wait until I upload the latest release of my installer package which will do everything for you.

Thanks so much for your new installer. Was just about to try manually updating my install when I looked at the old thread and found out you'd created this new installer. Worked a treat on my WD My Passport install, recognised the installed Plex and updated it. All working well, wife will be a happy bunny on our upcoming holiday.

Newbie here. Thank you for these very detailed instructions. Will these work on a WD Passport (not wireless)? I'm getting a connection error on the web browser, and a 'command not found' error in the terminal.

Just a quick note to let you know that the issue some users had with the Plex Media Server not starting when booting the WD My Passport Wireless is actually not an issue with my installer package, but seems to be an issue with some PMS revisions which would not start up correctly after an unclean shutdown. This issue seems to have been fixed now and I haven't been able to replicate it with the latest version of my installer package which contains PMS v1.2.3.2914.

@pswygs said:
Newbie here. Thank you for these very detailed instructions. Will these work on a WD Passport (not wireless)? I'm getting a connection error on the web browser, and a 'command not found' error in the terminal.

Hi pswygs!

My PMS installer package will only work with the WD My Passport Wireless, as this device contains a small Linux-powered computer which will quite happily run Plex Media Server if configured correctly.

It will not work on a standard WD My Passport device, which is only an external USB storage device. You may however use your My Passport device to store your Plex media library files and access them through a Plex Media Server running on another computer.

Howdy, Stranger!

When logs (server or client app) are requested for an investigation, please do NOT turn on "verbose" logging unless it is explicitly requested. Verbose logging makes things much more difficult in the majority of cases.